COVID-19 and cancer: The bad and the ugly

Patients with cancer are more vulnerable to COVID-19 infection with higher risk of severe symptoms and death. Cancer is the name for a multitude of different individual diseases that all have in common hallmarks such as inflammation, resistance to cell death, invasion, and metastasis. Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic, is estimated to have been responsible for more deaths per day than cancer in April 2020 in the United States. Although very different entities, COVID-19, a viral infection, resembles in some ways a malignancy: It invades the body and it causes inflammation. Patients with cancer are generally more prone to infections due to their malignancy, comorbidities, age, or anticancer therapies, but the effects of SARS-CoV-2 in patients with cancer are still unknown.